Hot water: Could the new LNG pipeline stir up old radioactive waste?

Barbara Taormina

Friday

Jul 27, 2007 at 12:01 AMJul 27, 2007 at 1:15 PM

During the ’40s and ’50s, radioactive waste from different sources, including a small company in Beverly that processed uranium for the first atomic bombs, was dumped in Massachusetts Bay. Polly Bradley and other members of the local environmental group, Safer Waters in Massachusetts, are worried that as the LNG project moves forward and Excelerate begins to dig into the ocean floor to construct 16.5 miles of pipeline, they may run into some of that long-buried and forgotten waste.

Polly Bradley leans back in her favorite stuffed armchair in the living room of her Nahant home, shakes her head and admits the fight with Excelerate Energy is pretty much over. The hearings have ended, the permits have been issued and the company has started construction of a new liquefied natural gas terminal about 13 miles off the coast of Gloucester.

“The time is very late,” says Bradley, who 24 years ago co-founded the local watchdog group Safer Waters in Massachusetts, or SWIM. “I just wish we knew a year ago what we know now.”

What Bradley and her group now know isn’t exactly a safeguarded secret. It’s more something that Massachusetts has swept under the rug and would probably prefer not to talk about.

During the ’40s and ’50s, radioactive waste from different sources, including a small company in Beverly that processed uranium for the first atomic bombs, was dumped in Massachusetts Bay. No one seems to know exactly what or how much radioactive junk was tossed overboard, but some suggest it could be tens of thousands of barrels and concrete containers. And it’s down there on the ocean floor in the company of lots of other containers of industrial chemicals and waste that were dropped off at the Massachusetts Bay Industrial Waste Site, which has affectionately come to be known as the “foul area.”

Bradley and other members of SWIM are worried that as the LNG project moves forward and Excelerate begins to dig into the ocean floor to construct 16.5 miles of pipeline, they may run into some of that long-buried and forgotten waste. And they say cracking open cans of radioactive stuff could be a potential disaster for the environment, the whales, the fishing industry and just about anyone who happens to have anything to do with the ocean.

Doug Pizzi, a spokesman for Excelerate, says that’s not going to happen. Pizzi says the pipeline route has been surveyed extensively with side-scan sonar and nothing extraordinary was found.

“This issue has been raised and vetted and nobody saw any evidence of radioactive waste,” says Pizzi. “There’s just nothing in the pipeline route — it’s just not there.”

But Bradley and SWIM aren’t convinced. They’ve written to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission pleading for more information about what took place back in the ’40s and ’50s. And they’ve asked Gov. Deval Patrick to get on board and look into the issue. If it turns out that the risks outweigh the benefits, they want work on the project to stop.

It’s a long shot and probably the last shot at stopping the LNG project that opponents say is an ecological threat and Excelerate says will be the safest and easiest answer to New England’s growing appetite for energy.

LNG Pro and Con

Lots of people have lots of reasons to hate the Excelerate LNG terminal and the Neptune LNG station which will be built roughly 7 miles off the coast of Gloucester. Both terminals are essentially huge buoys out in deep water that house a loading pipe. Tankers carrying cargos of natural gas that has been cooled down to a liquid can pull up to the terminals and unload. The gas makes its way through the new pipeline to the hub pipeline and then down to a facility in Hull. And that means more and more electricity so you never have to turn the lights off.

Fishermen don’t like it because it’s being built in a prime fishing ground and all boats will now be banned from the terminal areas, as well as the tanker lanes and routes. Whale watchers object because the tankers are a potential threat to six species of the local mammals, including the highly endangered right whale that’s known for swimming right into ships. And don’t even get them started on the sea turtles. Others say this is the start of the industrialization and privatization of the ocean — a resource that allegedly belongs to everybody.

But others think the new offshore terminals are the way to go. We live in a post-9/11 world, and nobody wants more shore-side LNG facilities that could be potential terrorist targets. If someone did choose to blow a hole in an LNG tank or tanker, the liquid would immediately start changing back into a gas cloud. Send a little current or spark through it and we’ll have quite the spectacle.

According to Sandia Laboratory, researchers for the Dept. of Energy, we could see a fireball big enough and nasty enough to give second degree burns to people who are more than a mile away. The thinking is if it’s out in the ocean, we’re safe.

But Bradley and SWIM members say maybe not. The say the possibility of digging up radioactive waste to construct the pipeline is a huge threat. And what’s alarming them isn’t so much what they know, but rather what they don’t.

Back Then

Nobody is arguing that radioactive waste isn’t out there. And everyone knows where the first batches came from. During the 1930s, a Marblehead guy named Peter Alexander developed a method to produce metals from their oxides. A few years later the folks from the Manhattan Project came calling to see if Alexander could whip up a little uranium metal from uranium ore at his Beverly plant, Metal Hydrides. They thought it might be useful for a little experiment they had going out West. And that was that — Alexander was in on the nuclear industry on the ground floor.

After WWII, sometime in 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission, successor to the Manhattan Project, decided to check the Metal Hydrides plant for radioactive contamination — and they found plenty of it.

According to David Adams, a chemistry professor at the UMASS-Amherst, all of the contaminated materials at Metal Hydrides were packed up. Parts of the building, tools, equipment, clothing — anything that glowed had to go.

“As a result of these investigations, virtually all contaminated materials … were packed into canisters loaded onto vessels provided by the U.S. Navy, towed 12 miles into Massachusetts Bay and sunk by Capt. George Perry, a local boat owner,” writes Adams in a paper tracing the history of Metal Hydrides’ connection to the atomic age.

“The canisters were not fully loaded to ensure that water would seep in and sink them. If they didn’t sink, Perry shot them with bullet holes,” adds Adams.

Apparently, Perry liked the job so much that he set up a company called Crossroads Marine Disposal Corporation and soon started collecting other people’s radioactive and chemical waste, which he hauled and dumped in Massachusetts Bay. And for his efforts, Perry picked up the nickname, “the atomic garbage man.”

Beverly fisherman Alessandro Cagiati, who has been one of the LNG project’s most vocal critics, has collected some of the old invoices from Crossroads from the Army Corps of Engineers archives. Those invoices show as late as 1959, Perry was dumping 30-gallon vats of radioactive waste about nine miles off the coast of Marblehead.

“Those documents were declassified, which tells me there are still other things that are classified,” says Cagiati, who has also presented evidence that some Air Force planes also did some dumping in the area.

The problem is nobody seems to know exactly what Perry or anyone else was tossing overboard.

“It’s called low-level nuclear waste, but low-level waste is anything that isn’t high level,” says Bradley. “Low-level waste seems to be anything that doesn’t blow up or kill you immediately.”

And the other problem is, no one is sure exactly where all of the radioactive stuff was dumped. There were three designated dumpsites to choose from, but it’s not clear if everything meant for those ocean dumps actually ended up there.

Cagiati says there’s radioactive waste a lot closer to shore than people realize.

“There’s radioactive waste at the 20-fathom ledge,” says Cagiati. “That’s in about 125 feet of water and it’s about a mile off shore in some places. That’s a fact.”

And that’s the type of information that has Bradley and SWIM members worried. Also, it’s been 60 years since people started dumping radioactive and chemical waste in the bay. Over time, currents, storms and tides may have moved sediment around and buried a lot of the waste most people would just as soon forget. And because exact information is so scarce, they worry that digging and laying an LNG pipeline might just shake up an old nightmare.

Flawed Studies

The Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies and universities haven’t completely ignored the issue of radioactive waste off the Massachusetts coast. Nobody has said “let’s get it out of there,” but there have been studies.

Most of that research seems to have been done with the goal of testing seafood to make sure it was safe. And even that took some prodding.

Fishing boats from ports up and down the coast kept reporting that they were hauling up barrels and broken concrete containers of waste in their nets.

One fisherman from Gloucester remembers when a little something extra came up in his nets some years back.

“We got a barrel in the net so we opened it,” he recalls. “Right away it started burning everyone’s eyes. A little of it spilled and it started to corrode the deck; we got scared and threw it back.”

During the ’80s and ’90s, government agencies conducted several surveys of the ocean floor using the latest high-tech gadgets available at the time. Yes, the EPA did find about 10,000 to 20,000 barrels in the foul area — the state’s main ocean dump site — and yes, about half of them were corroded, and yeah, there is some sediment that showed radioactive contamination — but according to the EPA there is no risk to human health and no imminent ecological threat.

But critics of those studies say the researchers never talked to Perry, never looked at his notes and they missed much of the waste simply because they didn’t look in the right area.

And Cagiati points out there’s no way to tell exactly what’s under a thick layer of sediment or mud with sonar that surveys the ocean floor, particularly if you are looking for radioactive material.

“You need different equipment for that,” he says.

‘Some Delay’

Bradley and other members of SWIM are now waiting on answers from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the ocean dumping, hoping that maybe, just maybe, it will boost their bid to stop construction of the LNG terminals and pipeline.

Of course, concerns about hardships to the fishing industry, potential ship strikes, threats to marine life, explosions, entanglements of whales, and degradation of water quality didn’t arch many eyebrows at the permit hearing for Excelerate’s LNG project. Is anyone going to bother about the prospect of twinkling fish and glow-in-the-dark whales?

So far, Bradley has had few signs of encouragement. In May, David Vito of the NRD Enforcement office wrote to Bradley saying he had forwarded her request for information and an investigation to “cognizant personnel.”

Vito also suggested that finding the answers might take the one thing Bradley hasn’t got at this point — time.

“Please understand that due to the age of the issues to which you refer, related information may not be readily available and some delay may be experienced if the retrieval of archived data is necessary,”

Vito writes.

But that’s not the worst of it, as far as Bradley sees it. She’s amazed at the lack of interest and attention to the problem of radioactive waste. At the very least, she hopes someone will be put in place to monitor the construction and make sure nothing radioactive is dragged up in the process.

“I am sure if there were a Spanish galleon and gold down there, a way would be found to monitor for it during construction and operation of the pipelines and terminals,” she says.

E-mail Barbara Taormina at btaormin@cnc.com.

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